Afternoon summary

• Labour has overwhelmingly backed Ed Miliband’s plans to reform party rules affecting leadership elections, membership and links with the unions. Although his proposals aroused controversy when first floated last year, delegates at a special conference in the ExCel centre in London backed them by 86% to 14%. Miliband said that he wanted the changes to ensure that the party stays more in touch with ordinary workers. In his opening speech he said he wanted Labour to be a movement again.

It has always been movements and people that change countries and change our world.

As Prime Minister I want to change this country, but I can only do it with a movement behind me.

It has always been this way.

Workers’ rights at the beginning of the 20th century.

The National Health Service after 1945.

The principle of equal pay for women in the 1970s.

The minimum wage in the 1990s.

Gay rights at the 20th century’s end.

All of these things happened, not because leaders made them happen, but because people and movements made them happen.

Today if you vote for these reforms you will be voting for Labour to be a movement again.

• Labour’s three most powerful union leaders have warned Miliband not to go any further in weakening the party’s links with trade unions. Unison’s Dave Prentis, Unite’s Len McCluskey and the GMB’s Paul Kenny all backed the plans. But, in highly critical speeches, they suggested that they would not countenance any further reforms of this kind. (See 2.51pm for more.)

Ed Miliband's party reforms - Analysis

So, what do we make of that?

Compared to 1993 (see 10.42am), today’s debate and vote was always going to be a bit underwhelming, and so it proved. Ed Miliband won big, but, having listened to the whole debate, what was striking was how conditional was the support he attracted from the union wing of the Labour movement. The figures do not show this; Miliband won 96% of the union votes but only 76% of the CLP votes. But the three most important speeches came from the leaders of the three most powerful unions in the party, and they all delivered quite tough rebukes to the Labour leader. The Unison leader David Prentis told him the plans were “the biggest turn-off ever” for voters. (See 12.17pm.) The GMB’s Paul Kenny said, effectively, that if Miliband wants to cut the size of the union vote at conference, he should take a leap. (See 12.02pm. At one stage Labour sources were briefing that these reforms could eventually lead to a review of the union vote at conference. That now seems to be off the agenda.) And Unite’s Len McCluskey accused the party leadership of perpetrating a gross miscarriage of justice. (See 12.42pm.) To compound the insult, McCluskey joked about the proposals - described by Miliband this morning as “the biggest changes to our party since 1918” - being less important than a football match (although McCluskey is from Liverpool, and I suppose up there football does trump everything.)

Still, McCluskey does have a point. The “biggest changes since 1918” claim does seem a bit overblown. Bigger than the introduction of an electoral college for leadership elections? Bigger than the introduction of OMOV for parliamentary selections? Bigger than all-women shortlists? Bigger than getting rid of Clause 4?

In truth, these changes feel a bit more incremental. They complete a process that has not advanced much since 1993. And that’s assuming that they are implemented in full. Listening to Kenny talk about implementation committee, I got the impression that there could be some watering down along the way. You could also argue that, in finally implementing genuine OMOV for leadership elections, Labour is only catching up with a procedure embraced by most other parties years ago. Even the Tories adopted OMOV under William Hague.

And would these reforms, if implemented before 2010, have changed the party to such an extent that it would not have lost the election, as Ed Miliband suggested? (See 1.59am.) Probably not, is the honest answer.

Yet, for all that, this remains a major achievement - certainly one of the most important of Miliband’s leadership.

It is undeniably true that Miliband has pulled off something that even Tony Blair never achieved. Blair knew that Labour had never really embraced full OMOV. Despite being reliant on the votes of trade unionists for his election as Labour leader, Miliband has at a stroke disenfranchised the 2.7m people offered a vote in Labour leadership contests because they belong to a Labour-affiliated union (although he hopes that many of them will vote in future as affiliated members). That in itself should be enough to kill suggestions that he is a lackey of Len McCluskey’s.

More importantly, Miliband has pushed through his reforms while holding the party together. He is not always the most inspiring leader, but, at party management, he is proving superb. Last summer few people thought he would be able to get his party to vote for reforms on this scale with a majority of almost 90%. But he did it. He made this point in his speech, and he was justified in doing so.

We have no idea yet what these reforms will achieve in terms of changing the way Labour party politics is conducted. But the very fact that Miliband has got them through, in the way he has, is a mark of leadership.

I took a big risk last July. But I did it because I believed, and I believe today, that we can face up to the challenges that our country faces if we face up to the challenges in our party. That is what we have done today and we should all be proud of a Labour party that has shown the courage to change.

I want to say one thing very directly to the country. Some of you left us at the last general election. Some of you felt that we had lost touch. You were right. These changes, agreed today, are designed to ensure that this party never loses touch again with this country.

Jon Ashworth, the Leicester South MP and a member of the NEC, is winding up the debate now on behalf of the NEC.

He pays tribute to Margaret Beckett, who spoke earlier. (She was one of the very few speakers I missed.) She was Labour’s first female leaders, he says. (Technically Beckett was leader after John Smith died, not just interim leader.) Having her here reminds us of John Smith’s vision, he says.

Ashworth says the collective voice of the unions in the party is staying.

The NEC will set up an implementation group to look at how these measures will be introduced, he says.

But Ed Miliband does not want to cut out working people. He wants to ensure they are heard.

When the Tories attack trade unions, they are attacking people like Natalie (a delegate who spoke earlier), working women who stand up for their rights and decent conditions, he says.

Len McCluskey's speech - Extracts

• McCluskey, the Unite general secretary, strongly attacked the Labour leadership for reporting Unite to the police in relation to the Falkirk selection. But he did say he was supporting the reforms.

This whole process began amidst a firestorm of political and media attacks on my union. [Unite was doing] what everybody now says they want us to do - encourage our members to join the Labour party, to help make our parliamentary party more representative of our voters and the country as a whole. And, yes, to select Labour party candidates who reflect our values. That’s not a crime in a democracy.

Let me make on thing crystal clear. The party has said it; the police should never have been involved. My union did nothing wrong. The smears and the lies and the innuendo will not deflect us from our political strategy.

Sir Ian McCartney, the former Labour minister, says Labour will only stay relevant if he can have a connection to the new workforce that exists today.

He says he met John Prescott this morning. Prescott told him that, before he gave the OMOV speech in 1993 (see 10.42am), John Smith told him that if he got these reforms through, he would be “the one member with the one vote”.

He says today could be historic. It will be historic if Liverpool’s Daniel Sturridge scores against Southampton this afternoon.

(I’m afraid, as a football agnostic, that reference is lost on me, although even I can tell that that’s a way of ridiculing Ed Miliband’s claims that today’s reforms are the most significant since 1918.)

He says Unison supports the reforms. The old system was not working.

But the reform process was launched on the back of a “firestorm” that occurred in relation to the Falkirk selection.

Unite did nothing wrong. It was just trying to recruit people to Labour.

Yet Unite was subject to “smears”, he says.

He asks delegates to show their support for Steve Deans, the Unite convenor and one-time Falkirk chair who was hounded our of his job. Deans gets a large round of applause

Dave Prentis's speech - Extracts

Here are the key points from Dave Prentis’s speech.

• Prentis, the Unison general secretary, described Miliband’s reforms were “the biggest turn-off ever for those we want to vote for us”. He said Unison was supporting them, but that they were a distraction from the task of attacking the coalition.

For our members this has been a distraction, and today is about putting all this behind us - an internal, divisive argument that should never have happened. Today we need a vote to move forward to tackle the real enemy - the coalition ...

Only 82 days before the local and European elections, the country doesn’t want to hear about our internal structures, our voting processes. This report is not going to get food on the tables of those queuing at food banks ...

So, no more talk of division. No more internal feuds or washing our dirty linen in public, the biggest turn-off ever for those we want to vote for us. Now is the time to move forward.

Emma Burnell is speaking now on behalf of the socialist societies. She says at the last leadership election, she had six votes. She cast them all for Ed Miliband. But she would have needed 11,000 of those votes to have has much voting power as a single MP.

Paul Kenny's speech - Extracts

Here are the key quotes from Paul Kenny’s speech earlier.

• Kenny, the GMB general secretary, warned that the unions would oppose any further attempt to weaken their influence in the party.

Unions are collective bodies. That’s what we are. We are a collective organisation, with a collective voice. And that collective voice, as we said right throughout this, is not for sale. Our affiliations, our conference voice and our NEC voice is absolutely crucially important to ensure that that collective view of our members, up and down the country, all walks of life, is heard centrally to the Labour party. And that’s not up for discussion. So anybody that wants to do a bit of wine bar gossip about this - rule that out.

• He expressed doubt about how the registered supporters scheme would work.

Let’s be fair about it, I have never seen how this is audited. And the implementation committee, with the registered supporters scheme, I think will have a real, real job making sure that, whatever that registered supporters scheme, that it stands scrutiny in the same way that the trade unions and their membership stand scrutiny.

Peter Fermin, a delegate from Hampstead, is speaking against the plans. He asks why, if Ed Miliband is so keen on internal democracy, the leadership ignores the party conference when it votes in favour of rail nationalisation.

Paul Kenny, the GMB general secretary and chair of TULO, the trade union and Labour party liaison organisation, goes next.

He starts with a joke. A shark swallows George Osborne. Then he spits him out. Why? Osborne kept saying: “I’m George Osborne and I care about the poor”. Not even a shark could swallow that, says Kenny.

He takes issue with the first speaker. She implied that trade unionist did not campaign. But they do, he says.

Kenny says that watering down the union link further (ie, by reducing the voting strength at party conference) is off the table. Any “wine bar” talk on this should be discounted, he says.

He says that unions have always been in favour of OMOV.

But he says he is not sure how the registered supporters idea could work in practice.

The first speech comes from a CLP activist from Barrow in Furness who says she will be voting for the reforms because she believes in the union link.

It is not fair that we keep the joy of door-knocking all to ourselves, she says. We should share that with others (ie, affiliated union members, who, under these plans, would become more fully involved in party affairs).

Remember that picture of the Tory front bench recently. There were people from Eton, people from Harrow, and people from Westminster. But not a single woman, he says.

The Tories have not got MPs in the big northern cities, he says.

And what did the Tories say after the Wythenshawe and Sale East byelection? That they did not expect to do well, because the constituency contained the largest council estate. That says it all, he says.

The main unions are backing the Miliband reforms. But the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union are going to vote against.

They are not exactly a mighty force in the party, and I don’t think I’ve ever written about them before. But yesterday they sent me a press release. This is from Ian Hodson, the BFAWU’s president.

When any politician starts talking about ‘reform’ the klaxons start blaring as ‘reform’ usually means dilution, erosion or a total dismantling of a system for ideological gain.

Trade Unions are already an honest and transparent movement of mainly ordinary folk who want the voice of working people to be heard loud and clear in the political arena. The recommendations in this draft have the potential to silence the voice of ordinary people and hamstring their representation in Parliament.

There would be no Labour Party without Trade Unions and they have earned the right to decide their own structure and deserve to be consulted in any ‘reform’ discussion in relation to the Political Party they formed. If Labour want to dictate that relationship whilst taking the money, that money can easily be removed and spent elsewhere.

Labour released some extracts from Ed Miliband’s speech overnight. Here they are:

Today I ask you to seize the chance to change our Party so that together we can change the country.

More and more people are turned off from politics. It increasingly feels like a match being played while the stands are emptying. We won’t turn that round by saying we’re right and they’re wrong. We won’t do it by singing the old songs even louder. If we do we’ll find ourselves shouting in an empty stadium.

That’s why today we are debating much more than our internal party structures. We’re debating something far bigger: how do we get people back into our politics? Think about the people you meet in your daily lives. Let’s not fall for the myth that they don’t care. They do. They are just turned off political parties.

We have to have the courage to change. There are thousands of working people, affiliated to our Party, in your constituency. But at the moment you have no way of reaching them. Home helps who look after the elderly, and worry about their own mums and dads. Classroom assistants who teach our sons and daughters, and have high hopes for their own kids. Construction workers who build the homes we live in, but worry about whether they can afford a home of their own. People who keep our shops open morning, noon and night, but are at the sharp end of the cost-of-living crisis. And the porters, nurses and all the health service workers who support the pride of Britain: our National Health Service.

These are the working people affiliated to our party. But too often affiliated in name only. And think of all the other people, not in trade unions, whose voices we also need to hear: low-paid workers whose boss won’t recognise a union, small-business owners struggling to get a loan from the bank, stay-at-home mums who ask whether anyone is going to speak up for them.

I don’t want to break the link with working people. I want to hear the voices of working people louder than ever before. But in the 21st century, not everyone wants to be a member of a political party. And you shouldn’t have to pay £45 to have a voice in the Labour Party. That’s why I want to bring in the 100,000s of people who are supporters of our Party. And make them part of what we do.

Only Labour can be the party that fights for every person, from every walk of life, from every part of the United Kingdom: North and South, young and old, women and men. Only Labour can be a truly One Nation Party.

And today, we won’t just be voting to open our doors. We’ll be voting for the biggest transfer of power in the history of our Party to our members and supporters. Today, in leadership elections, an MP’s vote is worth 1,000 times more than each Party member’s.

Twenty-one years ago John Smith set out on the journey of One Member, One Vote. Today we can complete that journey.

Let’s make ourselves the party of equality. Not just in the policies we propose, but in the politics we practice.

And we can bring people in if we make them part of campaigns that change their communities. Keir Hardie used to call our Party a movement. Think about that word. It’s movements that change things.

Let’s invite people in and show what we can do together. Campaigning to stop the payday lenders ruining people’s lives, campaigning for and winning a living wage across our country. campaigning to freeze that energy bill, and in the next 200 days, campaigning and winning the fight to keep Scotland as part of the United Kingdom.

It has always been movements and people that change countries and change our world. If I am elected as Prime Minister I want to change this country, but I can only do it with a movement behind me, supporting what we do and shaping our policy.

Today if you vote for these reforms you will be voting for Labour to be a movement again. Arguing our case house by house, village by village, town by town. But movements are only as strong as the people within them. The depth, the diversity, the reach of a movement is the true measure of its strength and its ability to make change.

That’s why we have to change, that’s why we have to bring people in. Today, let’s vote to change our Party. Let’s build a movement. So that tomorrow, we can change our country.

Many people think that Labour adopted OMOV in 1993. John Smith was leader at the time and, after a bitter row, he narrowly won a vote on OMOV reform at party conference. It was a dramatic occasion, and it was widely assumed that Smith only won because of John Prescott’s wind-up speech, which has the unusual distinction of being remembered as both the most garbled, but also one of the most effective, party conference speeches of modern times.

But 1993 OMOV only applied to the selection of party candidates. Labour still selected its leaders using an electoral college, which meant that in the 2010 leadership election ballot papers were sent to 2.7m union members, many of whom do not even vote Labour.

Today that’s going to change. At a special conference in the ExCel centre in London the party is going to vote for a package of measures covering leadership election, membership and links with the union. Ed Miliband launched the process last year, in the light of the controversy about the Falkirk selection, and at the time his proposals focused on ensuring that the party would only take money from union levy payers if they had taken a personal decision to opt-in. That idea has survived, although it will not be fully implemented for another five years. But full OMOV for leadership elections (or a version, because “members” could be full members, affiliated members, or registered supporters) is now probably the key element in the package.

Here’s how the Labour party summarised the reforms in a news release yesterday.

These reforms will give:

· Union members a positive choice over paying affiliation fees

· People who want to become Affiliated Supporters their own individual voice within Labour

· An equal vote in leadership elections to Members, Affiliated Supporters and Registered Supporters according to the principles of OMOV

· Londoners who support Labour the chance to choose the Party’s candidate for Mayor

· A guarantee that the process for selecting candidates is free from manipulation and fair to everyone

Sadly, today’s drama will not match 1993’s. There is wide support for the reforms in the party, and they are certain to be approved by a very large majority.

Still, there are concerns about them in some quarters, partly because they could jeopardise Labour party funding, and partly because one implication of OMOV is that the unions should give up their 50% vote share at party conference - which is something union leaders bitterly oppose. Today’s debate will give us a glimpse into the sometimes murky world of the Labour/union relationship.

Here’s the agenda for the day.

11am: Angela Eagle, shadow leader of the Commons and chair of Labour’s national executive committee, opens the conference.